Sometime in the mid-1980s, writer Keith Huff found himself at what is now the Brown Line station near Lawrence and Western avenues. As he was walking up the stairs to the platform, he heard a loud pop.

When he arrived, he saw that a CTA worker had fallen onto the tracks. He was sitting on the rails, swaying.

At this point in Huff’s story, told to me over an unusually dramatic lunch the other day in this writer’s usual low-key way, he started talking a little more quickly.

“I jumped down on to the tracks,” Huff said. “I didn’t know if he was drunk, or if maybe he’d had a stroke.”

Wasn’t he worried about the third rail?

“I just didn’t think,” Huff said.

There was a woman on the platform; Huff coaxed her into helping him, and the pair carried the man up and over to the warming light, those miserable oases of comfort in coldness. Once there, they found what was wrong.

“The man had a bullet hole in his temple,” Huff said. “He was drooling blood. It was pooling on the platform.”

A train finally arrived (this was before cellphones) and the operator called 911. But it was too late.

“We were all crying,” Huff said. “Then the man lifted his arms as if to embrace us all. He said, ‘Shhh, it’s OK.’ And then, maybe 30 seconds later, he died. There was silence.”

Huff stared back at me.

“I’ve always wondered what those words meant,” he said.

Well, if you wonder about stuff and you’re a writer, you usually write what you wonder, and the new play coming to the American Blues Theater this weekend, “Six Corners,” is the result. You can see it at Stage 773.

Actually, “Six Corners” is more about what happened in the hours after the man died, but before I explain that, hang on for a second and note this.

Huff, who lives in Chicago’s Edgebrook neighborhood with his family, has long been one of the city’s most successful dramatic writers. He is the author of “A Steady Rain,” which sold every ticket on Broadway with Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig in the lead roles, and “The Detective’s Wife,” which premiered at Writers Theatre in Glencoe . He has done stints in the writer’s rooms of “Mad Men” and “House of Cards.” Most recently, he has worked on “American Crime.” He’s currently working on Martin Scorsese’s project to build a TV show from “Gangs of New York,” and on a potential dramatic adaptation of “American Pharaoh,” the biography of the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, as penned by Adam Cohen and former Tribune literary and magazine editor Elizabeth Taylor.

He doesn’t like living in Los Angeles (“you get skin cancer”) but he is far busier than most who do.

In other words, he doesn’t have to be handing his world premieres to American Blues Theater, but he likes the company and it allows him to work again with director Gary Griffin, who helmed “The Detective’s Wife.”

But back to that night in the 1980s.

After the police came, Huff and the unknown woman were taken to the police station at Belmont and Western. The police had no idea what had happened, of course, and there were no other witnesses, and the pair were covered in blood, so they were put in separate holding areas and questioned, presumably in an attempt to see if their stories matched.

“I looked out from the room,” Huff said, “And I could see that the detectives were arguing. I decided they were trying to construct a narrative from two different points of view.”

So that’s the genesis of a play that asks a few questions: Do the police tell us the truth about what is going on? Or do they manipulate their own data to tell us the city is safer than we think? Is that telling a noble lie?

And what if one of these police officers, these watchmen and watchwomen, looks out and sees nothing but the darkness?